Good to know, thank you!

Personally I think we should add a differentiation between the storage policies of content which is owned by your own instance and content that federates from other instances.

The former should be kept for a long time (forever?), while the latter can be cleared more regularly.

Good point. I guess my vision differs somewhat from that quote there. Dang.

Welp, good find! I still think my idea for federation would be more resilient, but either way, we’re all wishing the best for this instance, and I really appreciate these discussions we’re having. Cheers to that!

You’re positing we not try to convince people who hold wrong worldviews?

Absolutely fair enough. Am happy to agree to disagree. I enjoyed the debate haha!

And yes, you have a good point: Meta would indeed get value through federation, and perhaps you don’t want to support Meta’s goals, so you don’t want to allow them to proceed. Perhaps we could enhance our user/community level moderation tools to achieve these goals? Maybe you as a user could say something like “never shall any of my posts be sent to Meta’s instance”. Or maybe community mods could say “Meta users can’t join/post/see our community”. I’m even happy if instances enable such filters by default! I just don’t think defederation is the right tool for the job, because it defeats the vision of a connected universe.

I don’t feel like the example with email is fair, because it’s comparing a private messaging service between two users, and a social network where you provide content for other users

Yeah, but I believe the principle holds.

Again, thanks for the opposing viewpoint. Glad we had the debate. Cheers!

I’ve read that XMPP article before, but it doesn’t convince me.

Yes, Meta may “kill” the fediverse. That’s a risk. But either we take that risk, or we “kill” the fediverse ourselves by defederating. That’s my opinion.

EDIT: Besides, defederating just hands them more users. Wouldn’t you rather keep the users, and allow them to see Meta content? Maybe even attract some Meta users here by inviting them? The launch of a Meta competitor is what’s causing the risk to the fediverse. Federating with them is how we can mitigate that risk.

Risks/rewards for whom?

For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.

But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
• Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
• Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user’s post or a @meta.com community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.”. As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

If we can’t convince people of our point of view, then that’s our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we’re saying “we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to”. That doesn’t seem appropriate.

corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it’s hosted. If we don’t do that, we’re not really a fediverse.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they’d all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become “too big”. The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****

I appreciate your engaging with me on this, though you haven’t convinced me yet :)

I’m in agreement with you that Meta absolutely intends to exploit “the fediverse” for their own benefit: to gain users by making their platform valuable.

But… my take on this is: so what? If the fediverse can only operate when all actors are benevolent and selfless, then it won’t last very long at all. And, even if it does, it’s not as valuable to me that way, so I’ll be leaving. What’s the value of a fediverse if it doesn’t even federate with any of the major players that have the most resources?

This would be even worse if we defederate later, once it turns out that Meta is trying to do something that really warants a defederation.

I honestly don’t think that anything ever justifies defederation, aside from technical limitations. If you want to run a gated forum, fine, but then don’t call it a “fediverse”. It’s just a forum. Would we say that it’s fair for Google to say “From now on, Gmail will not send emails to @republican_party.org email addresses because we don’t agree with them”?

EDIT 1: I haven’t made my point very clearly. Am currently editing this message to make it clearer.

EDIT 2: Left the comment the way it was. Am struggling to express myself properly-- this is the best I can do at the moment.

Yeah I mean I agree that the phenomenon described by that “paradox” exists, but I’ve come across it before and I have very little respect for that idea.

My opinion is that this “paradox” has a simple resolution:

1. Intolerant ideas (including messages and posts) should be allowed, considered, and countered with better ideas. Should be easy, since intolerant ideas are generally shitty ones.
2. Intolerant actions (and I’m differentiating against speech from action here) should be prevented.

I say that pretty much covers it. “Intolerant people” isn’t a useful thing to talk about. Either they’re holding intolerant ideas in their head and we should respectfully convince them to reconsider, or they’re doing intolerant actions (again, not including speech/posts/comments) which should be prevented.

The “paradox” just seems like an excuse to justify people’s own intolerance, so I don’t like it.

I appreciate your reconsidering your position! Thanks for taking my argument in good faith hahaha. I was worried I’d get some hate for it.

Cheers!

I’m also interested in the same. But honestly even if Facebook is operating in bad faith, such is life. We shouldn’t abandon our core concept even so. In my eyes, we’re testing the “hardness” of the fediverse to operate even if individual instances, howsoever large, operate with self interest.

So, are we saying we want more people to create accounts on Meta’s Threads?

That’s what defederation would imply: people who want to interact with Meta’s folks and be in touch with Meta’s community would end up creating accounts there. We’d be handing users to Meta by doing that.

Clearly, Meta has tons of resources to invest. If they have half a braincell among them, they’ll be able to create some value with those resources. Given that they’re launching Threads with or without federation, we now have two options:

1. We let Meta enhance the value of all instances.
2. We lock out Meta, and all their value created remains their own.

What are we even talking about here? A ton of people put in a ton of effort and work to create a platform where the whole point is to have different organizations be able to inter-operate without any one instance gaining too much power. As soon as someone with actual resources wants to contribute, we shut them out? Folks, if a single organization could bring down the fediverse, then the “decentralize so that no one can gain too much power” model is proven wrong, and it was bound to fail anyway.

If we become an echo chamber where the only one who can be part of the “fediverse” are people without resources, then what’s even the point? Who wants an email service that can’t send emails to Gmail and Hotmail, but only YourFriendlyLocalInstance.com?

The way I see it, we should absolutely not defederate. I’d prefer to see Google or Twitter also join the fediverse, and have them competing amongst each other to make sure we have enough competition to keep any of them from wanting to defederate.

EDIT: Quoting this deep child-level comment, which explains my point of view better:

We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all Meta communities and all Meta users if they choose.
• Let users set that none of their posts should federate to Meta.
• Let community mods block all posts from Meta users.
• Let community mods decide never to let Meta users see any of the posts on their community.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a Meta user’s post or a Meta community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities.

That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.” As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.

You’re welcome! Hope it’s useful :)

Thanks for calling this out! Fixed, I hope. Wasn’t intentional.

Agreed! I think this is generalizable to say that CSR is when you need to show “loading indicators” which is kind of annoying because… I had to send the loading indicator from server -> browser… so it was loading just to load some more.

Yeah, a few times. It was especially helpful in finding causes of subtle UI bugs, to identify the exact commit which changed the UI.

Agree! Defederation is a nuclear option. The more we do it, the more we reduce the value of “the fediverse”, and the more likely we are to kill this whole project.

I think defederation should only be a consideration if an instance is consistently, frequently becoming a problem for your instance over a large period of time. It’s not a pre-emptive action.

If “botters” are willing to spend >$5 per bot on established instances, then I don’t believe this is a solveable problem. For the fediverse, or for ANY platform, Reddit included. I am perfectly human, and would be hard-pressed to decline a >$150/hour “job” to create accounts on someone’s behalf.

Like any other online community, constant vigilant moderation is the only way to resolve this. I don’t see how Lemmy is in any worse position than Reddit so I don’t think we need to be all “doom and gloom” quite yet.

As for botters creating their own instances…

For example, newly created domains might be blacklisted by default.

This is just a start. Federation allows for many techniques to solve this. Perhaps even a “Fediverse Universal Whitelist” with an application process. I’m excited for the possibilities, but again I don’t think it’s quite time to be overly concerned yet. These are solvable problems.

There are two worries here:

1. Bots on established and valid instances (Should be handled by mods and instance admins, just like conventional non-federated forums. Perhaps more tooling is required for this— do you have any suggestions? However, I think it’s a little premature to say that federation is inherently more susceptible or that corrective action is desperately needed right now.).

2. Bots on bot-created instances. (Could be handled by adding some conditions before federating with instances, such as a unique domain requirement. Not sure what we have in this space yet. This will limit the ability to bulk-create instances. After that, individual bot-run instances can be defederated with if they become annoyances.)